BIOMORPHIA
A thesis submitted to the College of the Arts
of Kent State University in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Master of Fine Arts
by
Ryan T. Osborne
May, 2014
Thesis written by
Ryan T. Osborne
B.A., Ferrum College, 2011
M.F.A., Kent State University, 2014
Approved by
______________________________________
Eva Kwong,, M.F.A., Advisor
______________________________________
Christine Havice, Ph.D., Director, School of Art
______________________________________
John R. Crawford, Ph. D., Dean, College of the Arts
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
LIST OF FIGURES ....................................................................................................................... iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................................ v
BIOMORPHIA ............................................................................................................................... 1
TECHNICAL INFORMATION ..................................................................................................... 6
FIGURES ........................................................................................................................................ 8
REFERENCES ............................................................................................................................. 17
iii
LIST OF FIGURES
Figure
Page
1.
Installation View, No. 1 ....................................................................................................... 8
2.
Installation View, No. 2 ....................................................................................................... 9
3.
Pinch .................................................................................................................................. 10
4.
Mountains and Valleys ...................................................................................................... 11
5.
Mountains and Valleys (detail) ......................................................................................... 12
6.
I’ll Go This Way, You Go That Way ................................................................................ 13
7.
Cluster No. 1 ...................................................................................................................... 14
8.
Torso .................................................................................................................................. 15
9.
Beaky Body ........................................................................................................................ 16
iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to thank my parents, William and Maureen, and my brother Patrick and his wife
Jessica, for their unwavering support, as I would not have progressed this far without them. I
would also like to thank my advisor Eva Kwong, Isabel Farnsworth, Fred Smith, and Brinsley
Tyrrell for all of their dedication in helping me achieve my goals. I dedicate my thesis to the
memory of my professor, mentor, and friend, Kirk Mangus. Without his guidance, his
encouragement to take my work further, and his immense support, I would not be the person or
artist I am today.
v
1
BIOMORPHIA
The ceramic sculptures within my thesis are about human and organic forms. A
combination of my own influences, spontaneity of the building process, as well as the limitations
of the clay determines the form of each piece. My forms come from organic shapes, the human
body, rock formations, and the rolling hills of Tennessee where I grew up. I pay a great deal of
attention to both the human-like and organic qualities of each piece as well as the physicality of
the clay. I find that the glazing and painting of my work gives them an enhanced surface quality.
The process of creating is quite important to me as well. The sculptures within this exhibition are
produced with a firm focus on form, interacting with the clay, and glaze finishes.
There have been many influential artists who have inspired this body of work in various
ways. Henry Moore, Jean “Hans” Arp, Ken Price, and Barbara Hepworth are the most notable. In
his book, On Being a Sculptor, Henry Moore discusses the importance of form and the reductive
process. Although my larger forms are almost completely coil built, an additive process, my
smaller works are all carved. I too, share an interest in stone carving and have a great deal of
respect for those who carve completely in stone. This is the main reason for smoothing out my
forms so much, is so that they appear to be one, single block. Henry Moore discusses, at length,
the importance of outside influences on his forms:
A limitless scope is open to him. His inspiration will come, as always, from nature and
the world around him, from which he learns such principles as balance, rhythm, organic
growth of life, attraction and repulsion, harmony and contrast…He will want his works to
be creations, new in themselves, not merely feats of copying nor of memory, having only
the second-hand life of realistic waxworks. (Moore, 91).
2
These principles of design that Moore speaks of are all things that I always try to
incorporate into my work: looking at one’s surroundings, repetition, texture, harmony and
contrast, et cetera. One of the things I loved most about living in the rural areas of the
southeastern United States was being immersed in the beautiful countryside, where I could see
these elements around me. The mountains and farmland of northeast Tennessee and southwest
Virginia in particular have been important to my work. The rolling hills, mountains, rivers, lakes,
the texture of farmland, lost and forgotten tobacco barns, have contributed to my vocabulary of
form and texture. I have taken these forms and images and have applied them to my sculpture. I
think of my work as being types of “bodies”, as well as landscapes, which subconsciously
influence my work. As I drive through the countryside, I like to think of the landforms as human
bodies. The rolling hills remind me of reclining figures, breasts, and hips, and as I make a turn
the mountain in the distance suddenly becomes a leg jutting out of the earth.
My working process is very spontaneous in nature. I start with a slab base (varying in
shape for each piece) and add coils either on the inside of the base or the outside, depending on
whether I want my form to be closing in, or opening out. I continue this method of building until
I come to a height and basic form that I am pleased with and then make judgments about whether
or not I should add an appendage, a bulbous or cone-like shape, or make some areas convex and
some concave, or put a hole through the middle. Sometimes there are outcomes in working with
clay that you do not expect. When a piece comes out of the kiln with cracks, I decided to
improvise by patching the cracks, sanding the surfaces back down, and painting them. The paint
gives a much different surface quality than the glazed forms.
Henry Moore discusses the qualities achieved from putting holes into his work, “The first
hole made through a piece of stone is a revelation. The hole connects one side to the other,
3
making it immediately more three dimensional.” (Moore, 147). My sculpture, Pinch, like many
of my forms incorporates each of the elements of design that Moore wrote about. [Fig. 2]. There
is a cone shaped “mountain” pulling out from the top of the form falling down and back up a
rolling hill. The cone then simultaneously gets pulled down and is almost touching another cone
shape coming out of the base of the piece. The shoulder or rolling hill on the right side of the
sculpture falls down into a valley next to a little canyon. The pouring on of the carbon trap shino
glaze immediately suggests moving liquid, thus suggesting lakes and streams. Pinch also
references the body. The extremities become arms and legs, where as the bumps could become a
shoulder or breast. The glazes on the surface suggest movement.
I see a lot of parallels between the human form and landscape, and I also love the contrast
between the two. My forms are burnished with ribs to seem as soft, smooth, and curvilinear as
skin, whereas the glazes can create very organic sensations. In her article, Barbara Hepworth’s
‘Biolith’, 1948-9, Penelope Curtis explains how Hepworth implicitly combines the human and
organic:
Many of the titles are neologisms, but ones that carry an authority that leads one to accept
rather than to question them. A majority iterate their duality: biolith, bicentric, bimorphic,
dyad. They represent the combining power of two units in their invented conglomerate
forms. One is clearly declarative: ‘Janus (Two Heads)’. Others use scientific language to
denote not only a geological age (‘Eocene’), but most interestingly, the outer part of a
flower which encloses the essential or sexual organs: ‘Perianth’…’Biolith’’s conjoining
of two forms in one, and of two languages too, can thus be seen as something deliberate,
rather than as something unavoidable; as deliberately double rather than as weakly
ambiguous. ‘One may be pursuing an emotion’, Hepworth wrote, ‘ or one may, in the
grip of an emotion be pursuing the unknown form to hold it?’ (Curtis, 842).
This is also how I view my own forms. I like the duality of the nature of the forms with the
nature of the glazes that are on them. Another sculpture of mine, Mountains and Valleys, looks
very much like a landscape upon completion. [Fig. 13]. The copper matte raku glaze, contrasted
with the smooth, smoked surface of the clay body, coincides quite well. Looking closer at a
4
detail it is easier to see the topographic qualities of the glaze. [Fig. 14]. The various colors in
each patch of glaze on the surface gives it the appearance of two mountains looking down on
farms growing corn, wheat, tobacco, and freshly plowed fields. The form in itself to me appears
to be a body lying on the ground with arms coming straight up and in.
I found that by doing different firings in various atmospheres, I was able to achieve
different colors and different feelings altogether. The majority of my raku-fired work has an
almost otherworldly feeling, whereas most of my wood fired sculpture and salt-fired pieces have
a very warm and organic quality about them. The two works that I included that have no glaze
are Body and I’ll Go This Way, You Go That Way. [Fig. 20, 21]. These two pieces were bisque
fired to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit and then painted. I chose the contrasting colors of the orange
and blue, and neon green and blue juxtaposed with the more organic qualities of the other pieces.
The eggshell surface of the paint creates a slight sheen that gives them almost as much life as the
dripping upward quality of the contrasting paint.
With the various types of atmospheric firings that I chose (raku, salt, and wood), I am
able to accentuate my curvaceous, body like forms with the desired effects of post-fire reduction
glazes in raku, the orange-peel textures of salt, and the subtle earth tones of wood firings. Even
the painting creates an interesting effect that has a much different feeling than those that are
glazed. These effects transform my works into moving bodies that also resemble landscapes.
With the titles being somewhat open-ended, I encourage the viewer to see whatever their first
instinct tells them. I hope that the viewer will see a sort of human form, whether its an entire
figure, or just part of a figure, and I would also hope that they see the landscapes the glazes
create on them. These works are about movement, intuitive and spontaneous creation, and mostly
about form. I want my work to reference the connection between the human body and the land
5
that I come from. The variety of colors and surface textures, and the soft, sensuous curves
accentuate the sculptural and tactile qualities of my forms. I am seeking a synthesis of these
qualities in my biomorphic forms.
6
TECHNICAL INFORMATION
My works in exhibition were formed primarily with basic coil building techniques and
carving directly from a solid block of clay. I used two clay bodies that I formulated or altered
and different glazes were used depending on the desired effect I wanted to achieve.
The following clays and glazes were employed:
Kirk’s Indie Clay, up to Cone 12 in a wood kiln – Reduction or oxidation
Holmes Fireclay: 30
Ball Clay: 30
XX Sagger: 30
Nepheline Syenite: 10
Sand: 15-30
Red Art: Optional, in scoops.
Gold Art: Optional, in scoops.
Native Virginia Red Clay, up to cone 12 in a wood kiln – Reduction or Oxidation
Add some of each for extra plasticity:
Red Art: Optional
Holmes Fireclay: Optional
Ball Clay: Optional
Copper Matte (Hutchins), Raku – Reduction and heavy Post-fire Reduction
Gerstley Borate: 80
Nepheline Syenite: 20
Bone Ash: 20
Copper Carbonate: 7
Cobalt Carbonate: 3
Chun Blue, Cone 6 – Reduction or Oxidation
Custer Feldspar: 47
Flint: 23
Gerstley Borate: 13
Whiting: 6
Dolomite: 4
7
Zinc Oxide: 4
EPK: 3
Bentonite: 3
Rutile: 2
Copper Carbonate: 1.5%
Cobalt Carbonate: .5%
Glossy Copper, Raku – Reduction or Oxidation
Gerstley Borate: 80
Nepheline Syenite: 20
Copper Carbonate: 5%
Carbon Trap Shino (Revised), Cone 10 – Reduction
Nepheline Syenite: 45
Soda Ash: 19
OM-4 Ball Clay: 15
Kona F-4 Feldspar: 11
EPK: 10
Copper Matte Crawl, Raku – Reduction or Oxidation
EPK: 50
Gerstley Borate: 25
Flint: 25
Borax: 25
Copper Carbonate: 5%
8
Figure 1
Installation View, No. 1
9
Figure 2.
Installation View, No. 2
10
Figure 3.
Pinch
11
Figure 4.
Mountains and Valleys
12
Figure 5.
Mountains and Valleys (detail)
13
Figure 6.
I’ll Go This Way, You Go That Way
14
Figure 7.
Cluster No. 1
15
Figure 8.
Torso
16
Figure 9.
Beaky Body
17
REFERENCES
Curtis, Penelope. Barbara Hepworth’s ‘Biolith’, 1948-49. The Burlington Magazine, vol. 148,
no. 1245, Sculpture (Dec., 2006). 841-842. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20074644.
Moore, Henry. On Being a Sculptor. London: Tate Publishing, 2013. Kindle File, (Locations 91,
147).